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UCS Hellmaker posted:Literally, everyone on this forums can look back on how school was for them, and remember how awful it would have been to even have be hinted about being LGBT. Being in high school during Dubya's presidency sucked. I remember the dancing and celebrating in college when gay marriage became a thing in the US, and I had been hoping that nobody else would ever have to grow up being afraid of this aspect of who they are. It's disheartening. The fact that genz is 3x more likely to identify as lgbtq+ gives a little bit of hope though, maybe it's not as scary for them. When I was really involved in activism the older people who were at Stonewall or of the era were crusty and serious. always telling us kids that we didn't know how good we had it, shaking their heads when we were casual about things which had once been taboo, gay handholding in public. Maybe it's just me becoming old and crusty, but sped up.
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Apr 18, 2022 09:48
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I hate to say it but there does come a point where being exclusionary is okay. If you include everyone who is in any way marginalized under the same big umbrella, your movement ceases to become a movement. Specifically there are two problems with being too broad. The first is that your movement no longer has a direction or specific achievable goals, as the various groups tug the movement in opposing directions. The second is that powerful interests which are part of the problem instead of the solution become the dominant voices. Take the US democratic party - in theory it's a large umbrella organization which represents the marginalized voices from many different groups across the country. In practicality, there are a few small groups which mostly dominate the policy agenda to the exclusion of others, and a small number of wealthy interests override the theoretical purpose of the organization on a routine basis. This has already come up in the thread several times, where democrats fail to support trans rights because other members of the organization have louder voices, and aren't concerned with or are actively hostile to trans people. What I am not saying is that you should be hostile to others, that things like sapiosexuality aren't real or don't deserve recognition, or that we shouldn't be allies. I'm also not drawing a line in the sand for who should and should not be a part of LGBTQ+ movements, I don't have a hard and fast answer necessarily. But saying that everyone deserves to be a part of the movement is also not a sensible position to take. Smaller, more focused advocacy exists and should continue to exist because overly large groups often fail to lobby for their smaller constituents.
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Apr 19, 2022 00:10
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OwlFancier posted:Is that because it is a broad coalition or is that because it is is functionally an oligarchy to which LGBTQIA activists have arrived late and do not hold any material power compared to the people already established in the organization who provide the money and the connections? I suppose a US political party is too broad of a target to be a useful example - but to use another one that has already come up in this thread, sometimes the gay & lesbian communities fail to stand up for the trans community or even the bi community. I'll use an example here as well, with the caveat/disclaimer beforehand that I fundamentally disagree with the position but find it illustrative regardless. The stonewall-era activists who taught the people I was active with had a small but vocal proponent who disagreed with the idea of 'allies' as we mean it in the LGBTQ+ community. Their experience with people who were involved with the movement but not actually party to the struggle firsthand was that the uninvolved people would co-opt the movement and be more of a hindrance than a help. When the time came to talk about solutions to problems and what was really necessary, the extra input from people who were not fully onboard was not only distracting, it was actively hurtful, and spawned nonsense like the idea in the early 2000s that to preserve the sanctity of ~real~ marriage we could make a separate gay marriage instead. So in the case of something like demisexual or sapiosexual, yes, I could see trying to include overly broad movements resulting in the idea of our queer community losing its own voice in the very movement we've built to help ourselves. When a movement with a (relatively) narrow scope and goal starts trying to achieve aims that are only tangentially related to its purpose at the behest of people who have little stake in it, it's a failed movement. But it's also time for me to argue against what I just said. The old-timers who said we didn't need allies are stupid. I 100% agree with you and think you are completely correct that we need allies, and that it's good to bring people into the fold of the movement proper when it's helpful for both groups. There's a quote I am going to brutalize here, but it goes something like "The trouble with being gay is that you're always born to straight parents" which isn't strictly speaking true, but gets the point across that we're a small group in a big sea of people, and trying to carve out our own ghettos like the bitter first gen activists would have us do is counterproductive and miserable. In particular your last two paragraphs are eloquently put I think. I'm just trying to express that I feel a tension between what you say there, and which I think should be true in the best world we can make, and what I have seen, which is that the bitter old timers aren't entirely wrong, and that it still happens every time I see the gay part of the community fail its trans members. I'm leery of the movement becoming aimless and toothless, but becoming isolated is as bad or worse.
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Apr 19, 2022 09:39
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It certainly doesn't make the thread feel like a welcoming place. I tend to lurk a lot more than I post, particularly outside of Games where nothing of importance is said; but seeing people get moderated for reasons I can't fathom just makes me want to post even less.
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Apr 25, 2022 09:46
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